Mischel Quotes

#1. Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions.

Daniel Kahneman

#2. Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world.

David Whyte

#3. He who thinks new favours will cause great personages to forget old injuries deceives himself.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#4. Writing is not a literary act but spiritual. And pastoring is not managing a religious business but a spiritual quest.

Eugene H. Peterson

#5. Melancholy is not one of my emotions. Quite seriously, I don't do melancholy. It's a miserable way to be.

Walter Mischel

#6. Oh thrice and four times happy ... those who plant cabbages.

Francois Rabelais

#7. No amphibious attack in history has approached this one in size. Along miles of coastline there were hundreds of vessels and small boats afloat and ant-like files of advancing troops ashore.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#8. If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.

Henry Miller

#9. I think the whole point about self-control, the whole point about willpower, is to help people understand that there are endless self-nudge techniques that can be enormously helpful and are very simple.

Walter Mischel

#10. I shall endeavour to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality, that my Readers may, if possible, both Ways findtheir Account in the Speculation of the Day.

Joseph Addison

#11. The idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us.

Walter Mischel

#12. [Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.

Anthony Minghella

#13. If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television, and you can save more money for retirement. It's not just about marshmallows.

Walter Mischel

#14. We are in a position of financial and social power, and we could be agents of change in our society. Without pretension, I believe we could be a nice little gardener who takes care of the garden, and hopefully our neighbor will do the same. Then, maybe we'll achieve a better world.

Guy Laliberte

#15. I have an easy tendency to stumble and fall, which is not a good thing in an 84-year-old guy, so when I brush my teeth, then I do balancing exercises.

Walter Mischel

#16. James Watson summarizes the conclusion: A predisposition does not a predetermination make.

Walter Mischel

#17. Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.

Walter Mischel

#18. In fact, Bill Clinton's an excellent example of what he should be doing when he realizes that he's not invulnerable. He realized two things: his invulnerability was contextualized in two things: junk food, and he had a problem with certain kinds of women.

Walter Mischel

#19. I made a pact with my three-year-old thumb-sucking daughter that if she stopped sucking her thumb, I would stop sucking my pipe.

Walter Mischel

#20. If you want to know why some kids can wait and others can't, then you've got to think like they think,

Walter Mischel